Marshall Greenspan

Biography

Marshall Greenspan’s pioneering work on multiple phase-center interferometric processing has significantly enhanced the state-of-the-art in ground-moving target indication (GTMI) radar technology critical to today’s military radar systems. Dr. Greenspan’s radar engineering career began in the early 1970s with the design and development of the navigation, targeting, and terrain-avoidance radar in the U.S. Navy’s carrier-based A-6 Intruder attack aircraft. The A-6 was designed to fly undetected at low altitudes for great distances at night and in all weather conditions, find its target, and return safely to its carrier. In the early 1980s, this radar was upgraded under Dr. Greenspan’s guidance to generate high-resolution images of the surface area illuminated by the radar beam. Indicators were overlaid upon the image to pinpoint the location of any ground moving targets found within the ground image scene. This revolutionary technology was adapted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Air Force in a demonstration program named Pave Mover that put a side-looking radar in a high-speed US Air Force EF-111 to detect and track armored ground vehicles at long range while simultaneously guiding missiles to their intended targets. This technology became part of the U.S. Air Force/Army E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), which provides ground surveillance to military commanders to support attack operations. With Dr. Greenspan’s expertise, JSTARS enabled US forces to map the position of the retreating Iraqi army during Operation Desert Storm. This work helped demonstrate the feasibility of GMTI space-time adaptive processing (STAP) for air-to-surface moving target radars at a time when computing technology was inferior to what is currently available. STAP’s importance to the radar community continues to grow as computing technology and radar hardware improve.